UI Enhancer Improves Firefox’s Address Bar Behavior

There is not really a lot that you can do with Firefox’s address bar, other than entering keywords or web addresses. A click on the site’s favicon opens a window with security related information about the site and the bookmark’s star at the end offers to bookmark the site.

UI Enhancer improves the Firefox address bar in several ways. It first turns each web address into a breadcrumb navigation. A click on one of the crumbs opens that part of the page right in the active tab. That’s not new, and multiple Firefox add-ons like like Location Bar 2 have offered a similar feature for some time now.

What makes this special is the ability to display the last 15 pages for each subfolder. This is done by moving the mouse cursor over the folder to highlight it and clicking the right mouse button afterwards.

You can alternatively left-click when one of the breadcrumbs is only partially highlighted. The menu that is opening up displays additional options.

• Edit: Allows you to edit the highlighted part of the address.
• Add: Allows you to add something to the highlighted part of the address.
• Copy: Copies the url, but cuts everything off that begins after the selected part.
• Copy all: Copies the web address to the clipboad
• Delete: Cuts everything after the highlighted part of the address and loads the result.

You can furthermore use the scroll wheel to instantly display related urls in the address bar which you can then access with a click.

The extension supports middle mouse button clicks and Ctrl-clicking wherever possible so that pages are loaded in new tabs instead of the active tab.

The add-on comes with its own stylesheet, and options to load a custom stylesheet instead which may be interesting for users who know their CSS and prefer a different design and layout.

The Bookmarks Enhancer that the add-on ships with is disabled by default. This basically auto-hides the bookmarks toolbar and displays it only when you move the mouse over into the header area of the browser.

Firefox users who like the feature set of UI Enhancer can download the extension from the official Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.

The most useful feature without doubt is the ability to display a history for each subfolder of a domain you are currently on. This can speed up site navigation and access of information considerable.